'Ghost particle' hunter Francis Halzen wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize

Belgian-American particle physicist Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for ground-breaking work creating an observatory to detect some of the universe's most elusive particles, high-energy neutrinos, and how they ​are created.

Halzen realized that ice at the South Pole could be used to track neutrinos, sometimes known as 'ghost particles' ‌for the way they pass through the Earth and our bodies without a trace, and only interact with matter extremely rarely.

"The messengers bring information from the cosmos," Reuters quoted Eva Olsson, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as saying at a press conference. "They open the door to distant galaxies and tell us about the processes ​of exploding stars."

The neutrino interactions collected by the IceCube observatory in Antarctica provide researchers ​with knowledge about how high-energy neutrinos are created, potentially even revealing previously unknown cosmic phenomena, the academy said.

In ​2014, the US-based Smithsonian magazine, dubbed Halzen "Neutrino Man" when giving him one of its ingenuity Awards, acclaiming him for an "amazing experiment (that) heralds the beginning of a new era in astronomy".